walkingshadow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
walkingshadow) wrote2005-10-21 06:49 am
walkingshadow) wrote2005-10-21 06:49 am
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the bears and bees and banana trees will play kazoos and tambourines
ahh, this hurricane season is a good season for record making and breaking. the title of most powerful atlantic storm on record has been awarded to wilma, the monstrous, slow-moving storm still flirting with the yucatán peninsula en route to, possibly, the west coast of florida and points east. its wind gusts at one point were reaching 190 mph. wilma has also "'obliterated . . . by a wide margin' the previous record for rapid intensification set in 1967" by growing in the span of eighteen hours from an 80-mph hurricane to, as previously mentioned, the most powerful atlantic storm on record. i think it's fun to say. in addition, wilma is this year's twenty-first tropical storm, tying the record set in 1933. can we break this record, folks? i think we can! we've come so far already!
we're on the good side of the state this time; we're ready to batten down the hatches when the time comes; we've got water, we've got peanut butter; we live in one of the few, small areas that rise above the floodplain. also when the time comes, cousin m.—plus the new kittens—will come to stay, as will my grandmother and her aide. in this scenario, i am sleeping on a couch. this is okay! i imagine everything will be okay, at least until such time as the power goes out, at which point we'll be seven people, three cats, and a labrador retriever sitting in a dark house with no air conditioning. candles give off more heat and less light than you'd think.
the local news is doing stories on hurricane fatigue, which is funny in the way that it makes me want to punch somebody in the face, because local television news is directly responsible for at least three-quarters of that fatigue, between the time they devote to coverage and their melodrama in delivering it. even their graphics make me tired: their capital letters, bad puns, waving flags, bright colors, and moving parts.
apart from continuing hurricane coverage, today was a good news day in that 1) tom delay was photographed, fingerprinted, and taken before a judge, and 2) a FEMA official testified that his bosses repeatedly ignored his correspondence regarding the expected and then existent catastrophic damage from hurricane katrina: "There was a systematic failure at all levels of government to understand the magnitude of the situation," Bahamonde testified. "The leadership from top down in our agency is unprepared and out of touch." i hope they burn. i hope they hang from the highest yardarm.
. . . okay, i'm not really informed about world events, you got me: it's just that there are fifteen televisions flashing in front of me when i'm in the locker room or on the machines at the gym (twelve of them tuned to news stations), and when i wasn't catching up on july's wired ("remix now!"), i was watching the closed-captioning scroll across the bottom of the screen.
mostly i was catching up on july's wired though, and i was of course interested in and amused by all talk of fanfiction and music copyright laws, as well as william gibson's article on the rise of cut-and-paste culture—though the latter made me wonder, because surely gibson, gaiman, et al. don't think any of this is new? gibson tracks the phenomenon back to william s. burroughs, but what is the wasteland if not a deliberate remix of the world's literature? eliot's notes were a published guide explaining where he'd lifted everything from. eliot once wrote, "One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion." what is the difference between an allusion and a sample? shakespeare didn't make up anything new: shakespeare took every story he wrote from the greeks, from virgil, from morality plays, legends, and english history—richard iii is real-person fanfiction.
this is our default mode for artistic creation, this recycling and remixing and resurrection. there are people—writers on my friendslist and disinterested reporters for reputable news agencies alike—who argue for fanfiction as a way of reclaiming communal storytelling, hacking into the traditions of oral history and troubadors. we're just now emerging from an anomolous age, a highly proprietary, commercialized age that brought us copyrights, patents, and royalties; products created with technologies used by the few and then distributed to the many. it's a matter of a pendulum swing. the means of and access to production are more widely available, true, but it's also a matter of philosophy. so much of law—that is, proscribed behaviors and keeping the peace—is a delicate, hopeful matter of authorities saying, please don't do this, and the majority of the people answering, yes, okay, we won't. when a majority of the people (or even a vocal, prolific minority) decide not to follow the rules anymore, the options of the authorities are to 1) give way and redesign the laws, or 2) declare martial law—and the RIAA can only wish it had that kind of power.
we're on the good side of the state this time; we're ready to batten down the hatches when the time comes; we've got water, we've got peanut butter; we live in one of the few, small areas that rise above the floodplain. also when the time comes, cousin m.—plus the new kittens—will come to stay, as will my grandmother and her aide. in this scenario, i am sleeping on a couch. this is okay! i imagine everything will be okay, at least until such time as the power goes out, at which point we'll be seven people, three cats, and a labrador retriever sitting in a dark house with no air conditioning. candles give off more heat and less light than you'd think.
the local news is doing stories on hurricane fatigue, which is funny in the way that it makes me want to punch somebody in the face, because local television news is directly responsible for at least three-quarters of that fatigue, between the time they devote to coverage and their melodrama in delivering it. even their graphics make me tired: their capital letters, bad puns, waving flags, bright colors, and moving parts.
apart from continuing hurricane coverage, today was a good news day in that 1) tom delay was photographed, fingerprinted, and taken before a judge, and 2) a FEMA official testified that his bosses repeatedly ignored his correspondence regarding the expected and then existent catastrophic damage from hurricane katrina: "There was a systematic failure at all levels of government to understand the magnitude of the situation," Bahamonde testified. "The leadership from top down in our agency is unprepared and out of touch." i hope they burn. i hope they hang from the highest yardarm.
. . . okay, i'm not really informed about world events, you got me: it's just that there are fifteen televisions flashing in front of me when i'm in the locker room or on the machines at the gym (twelve of them tuned to news stations), and when i wasn't catching up on july's wired ("remix now!"), i was watching the closed-captioning scroll across the bottom of the screen.
mostly i was catching up on july's wired though, and i was of course interested in and amused by all talk of fanfiction and music copyright laws, as well as william gibson's article on the rise of cut-and-paste culture—though the latter made me wonder, because surely gibson, gaiman, et al. don't think any of this is new? gibson tracks the phenomenon back to william s. burroughs, but what is the wasteland if not a deliberate remix of the world's literature? eliot's notes were a published guide explaining where he'd lifted everything from. eliot once wrote, "One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion." what is the difference between an allusion and a sample? shakespeare didn't make up anything new: shakespeare took every story he wrote from the greeks, from virgil, from morality plays, legends, and english history—richard iii is real-person fanfiction.
this is our default mode for artistic creation, this recycling and remixing and resurrection. there are people—writers on my friendslist and disinterested reporters for reputable news agencies alike—who argue for fanfiction as a way of reclaiming communal storytelling, hacking into the traditions of oral history and troubadors. we're just now emerging from an anomolous age, a highly proprietary, commercialized age that brought us copyrights, patents, and royalties; products created with technologies used by the few and then distributed to the many. it's a matter of a pendulum swing. the means of and access to production are more widely available, true, but it's also a matter of philosophy. so much of law—that is, proscribed behaviors and keeping the peace—is a delicate, hopeful matter of authorities saying, please don't do this, and the majority of the people answering, yes, okay, we won't. when a majority of the people (or even a vocal, prolific minority) decide not to follow the rules anymore, the options of the authorities are to 1) give way and redesign the laws, or 2) declare martial law—and the RIAA can only wish it had that kind of power.
no subject
And I don't even live there anymore.
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Anyway, I hear ya on the masses reclaiming culture. Issues of copyright have been really bothering me lately. Originally, it was used to protect creators of works against infringement of their natural rights to the ownership of their work. They must be credited, they couldn't be plagiarized, anything beyond "fair use" had to be used with permission, etc... But, now, copyright is a tool used by large corporations to ensure their monopoly on the cultural ideaspace. Disgusting! Disney doesn't need any more royalties on Mickey Mouse. Free Mickey!
To me, it's a matter of artistic freedom and the right of people to own their culture!
[steps off of soap box]
no subject
i think—i think—that copyright, etc. must have started as a way of protecting creators of artistic works from exploitation, but it grew into a way for a few people to make a lot of money at the expense of all the other people—including the creators themselves. and now we're all calling bullshit on that! it's sort of exciting to be in the transitional time, when we can see and sense that the old laws aren't good enough anymore, but no new system of doing things has been established yet.
the right of people to own their culture!
that is such a great way of putting it. i've never thought about it in those exact terms, but it makes the issue so clear.